identifier vs self

identifier

noun
  • Someone who identifies; a person who establishes the identity of someone or something. 

  • One who identifies as a particular type or role; one who says and believes that they are a certain thing. 

  • A formal name used in source code to refer to a variable, function, procedure, package, etc. or in an operating system to refer to a process, user, group, etc. 

  • A primary key. 

  • A guidebook that helps determine the specific class of an object (such as a mushroom, herb, fish, bird, drug, or mineral), or its individual identity (such as that of a star). 

  • Something that identifies or uniquely points to something or someone else. 

  • A code that distinguishes a particular element from all other elements in a document. 

self

noun
  • Identity or personality. 

  • Self-interest or personal advantage. 

  • A flower having its colour uniform as opposed to variegated. 

  • An individual person as the object of the person's own reflective consciousness (plural selves). 

  • One individual's personality, character, demeanor, or disposition. 

  • The subject of one's own experience of phenomena: perception, emotions, thoughts. 

  • A seedling produced by self-pollination (plural selfs). 

  • Any molecule, cell, or tissue of an organism's own (belonging to the self), as opposed to a foreign (nonself) molecule, cell, or tissue (for example, infective, allogenic, or xenogenic). 

pron
  • Myself. 

verb
  • To fertilise by the same strain; to inbreed. 

  • To fertilise by the same individual; to self-fertilise or self-pollinate. 

adj
  • Of or relating to any molecule, cell, or tissue of an organism's own (belonging to the self), as opposed to a foreign (nonself) molecule, cell, or tissue (for example, infective, allogenic, or xenogenic). 

  • Having its own or a single nature or character throughout, as in colour, composition, etc., without addition or change; of the same kind; unmixed. 

How often have the words identifier and self occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )